Here's what you helped us achieve in the last week (Patreon)

Dear KI community members, 

We hope your December has been off to a good start. We'd like to welcome our 145 new members this week. We really value every member and every contribution – we're proud to be reader funded! Thank you for standing with us.

Here are some highlights from the Kyiv Independent over the last week:

We published the second part of our investigation into Ukraine's International Legion. The follow-up to investigation published in August looks into allegations of light weapons misappropriation and abuse by commanders. Our next community event will be with the reporters who worked on this piece, Anna Myroniuk and Alexander Khrebet. You can register and submit your questions here. Pictured above is an illustration by Karolina Gulshani from the article.

We now have a Starlink that will keep us connected in the case of another power blackout. Pictured above is the Starlink in our office, which provides internet access via satellite. The roof was not an option for installation, so we had to get creative. 

We covered Russia's looting of the Kherson Fine Arts Museum. Francis Farrell reported from the museum, now empty, after Russia removed almost all of the 14,000 works in the collection. 

Two more stories from liberated Kherson Oblast include Asami Terajima's story about Chornobaivka, a town haunted by trauma of Russian occupation, and Igor Kossov's story about how volunteers helped the Kherson residents survive occupation. 

This week, Belarus Weekly includes Russia's transfer of 15 additional air defense systems to the country and looks at the allegations Belarusian for-profit prison labor is used by European furniture giants.

We reported on the increased scrutiny of Moscow-backed churches in Ukraine. In the past month, Ukraine's Security Service has raided several premises of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and there have been calls for the church to be banned altogether. 

We interviewed the Chechens fighting Russia in Ukraine. Two members of the Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion explain the similarities between Russian oppression of Chechnya and Ukraine and the common cause they're fighting for.

One of the most popular stories this week was Daryna Antoniuk's "Making sense of Ukrainian war memes," which explains the internet jokes and humor as a coping mechanism.

This week, episode six of our podcast Power Lines was released. Co-hosts Anastasiia Lapatina and Jakub Parusinski speak with Oliver Bullough and Maryna Khromykh about the rise and fall of Russia and Ukraine's oligarchs.

Editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko made the cover of Le Parisien. In the interview, she describes how Kyiv Independent journalists have had to become war reporters. 

Thank you for standing by our side as we bring independent, locally-sourced news about Ukraine to the world.